Kehua!

by Fay Weldon

  ‘For a bit of peace,’ Dionne said. ‘If a man moves into your life you do all sorts of things you wouldn’t do normally. It doesn’t have to be love; it’s the sharing of the bed that does it. Propinquity. You sop up their vapours, in every sense of the word. Besides, they were not really your friends. They were the companions of your youth, which is a very different thing. See them as Marcus sees them – satanic lefty scum – and absolve yourself.’

  Dionne tended to share Marcus’ political outlook, but then this was Paris and she was a courtesan and so oblivious to social censure. The kehua, lost amongst the blues and pinks of the pompom hydrangeas, chattered and squeaked and Dionne said, ‘Do you hear something?’ and frowned and Beverley said, ‘No.’ Her hearing was not as acute as once it had been. ‘All the same,’ said Dionne, ‘it might be safer not to go to the book launch.’

  It was touch and go whether the launch of Slicing the Salami would go ahead. There was litigation up to the very last moment. The media forgot their normal plea of the public interest, and betrayed one of their own, that is to say, Marcus. All noisily and passionately agreed there must be a limit to freedom of speech. Advance sales soared. The launch was on.

  Marcus took the BNP girl since Beverley was not around. She was small, dark and pale and wore a lot of make-up. (She was a friend of D’Dora’s as it happened. They belonged to the same rock-climbing club.) They were both very drunk. There were demos outside and scuffles with the police before, and it was touch and go whether they could get into the publishing house at all, let alone up to the penthouse on the fifteenth floor where the view over London is so great. But the GCGITS made sure they got there.

  Marcus and the BNP girl then apparently had an argument as to whether the view from the Penguin Penthouse in the Strand was better, and they left the party together. After that their movements were uncertain – London was not yet so lavish with its security cameras – other than that they ended up on the track of the Docklands Light Railway, where it runs overground near Canary Wharf; and both were struck and killed by an automated train. There was no evidence of foul play. Book sales were stupendous, Slicing the Salami had a six-month triumph, stayed around for a year or two, and then was quietly remaindered. Whatever the GCGITS’ purpose was, it was served.

  There were so many if-onlies for Beverley to worry about, amidst tears – if only I had gone to the book launch, if only I hadn’t provoked him, provided the research in the first place, driven him to drink and so on – that Beverley felt as guilty as if she had pushed Marcus under the train herself. She sometimes remembered what he had said to her on the doorstep, that the book could do no possible harm. But it had certainly created a fuss, and lost her friends.

  But gradually, like her family, friends drifted back, as did her good spirits. Robinsdale was her own again. She had the whole place redecorated. The ceilings, once yellow from cigarette smoke and the after-dinner cigar that Marcus had so enjoyed, were pure virginal white once again. She had a vestigial memory of someone talking about virgins and cloning, but did not pursue it.

  Let’s get out of here

  Lately Mr Bennett has been up and down the stairs rather too often for comfort. It is still terrifically hot up here – we’re in a heatwave – and the whiff of his cigar smoke is so strong as to be offensive. I am a non-smoker. Marcus, I notice, once just a cigarette smoker, has taken up cigar smoking as well. Go figure, as Beverley would say. Time to get downstairs again, where it’s cooler, and away from the unseen collie panting in the corner, and what I am beginning to construe as the squeaking of a double bed. I can’t blame the central heating at the moment and there’s no air-conditioning. I think I see Mr Bennett as very like Marcus, only without the brains. But then Marcus has no reality either, come to think of it.

  The other thing is that the father of my oldest child appeared to me yesterday, smiling, and I was conscious of a great affection for him. He died fifteen years ago. I had not married him but chosen to bring up the child without him. Unkindly, and unthinkingly, I had barred him from the whanau. When I say ‘appeared’ it was not quite in the flesh, nor in a dream: somewhere in between. Just that I remembered what he looked like, how he was, what his presence felt like, so clearly he might as well have been there in the real world. Mind you, I had just had three teeth out and was somewhat medicated. Though I was pleased to see my first sweetheart, and so pleased to be pleased, it is always a little worrying when deceased family members appear at one’s side.

  I remember how when my mother was very old and in a nursing home the nurse phoned us early one morning. ‘You’d better come now,’ she said.

  I asked in alarm what had happened and she said, ‘Your mother’s in her normal good health. But when she woke this morning she told me she’d had a vivid dream. Her father was coming towards her smiling and stretching out his hand for her. Back home in Jamaica, at the training college, they taught us that if the patient was summoned by a family member in a dream we were to call the relatives at once. So that’s what I’m doing.’

  We went at once, and by the next morning my mother had died; we were in time to say goodbye. So if my son’s father comes to me in a dream, I am glad to know he is in the whanau in spite of me, but I am also a little nervous. And I have to finish this book before I go. The show must go on.

  I’ll do it downstairs in the cool, not upstairs. Upstairs, once so tranquil and benevolent, hasn’t half got itself all stirred up.

  PART THREE

  Enchanted Scarlet

  We’ll take a brief look first at Scarlet, since she’s so restless. The fates are with her: a parking space has opened up in front of Costa’s. And she parks the Prius swiftly and neatly. She is a safe, confident, polite, alert driver – this is her New Zealand ancestry: this is Arthur in the Mercury, taking the hairpin bends in his stride, pulling to one side if there is a faster car behind him – not, once he had the Mercury, that there ever was. Arthur, as it happens, died in his bed, not in the fireball that Beverley – with that part of her mind which ever allows Arthur to surface at all – half fears, and half hopes for. He died of heart failure in 1980. Rita was at his bedside. She had been rising thirty when they married and had been all the more pleased to be taken off the shelf.

  ‘Taken off the shelf ’ is a phrase not in common use today. It’s how spinsters – those who had lagged behind in the marriage race and remained old maids by their late twenties – were spoken of. Rita, unmarried and thirtyish, having ‘put on her bonnet’ (in other words given up), had taken in little Beverley for company, in place of the child she was unlikely to have, and had been rewarded. Any husband was better than none. But back, briskly, to Scarlet.

  Scarlet manoeuvres smoothly and efficiently into a tight space which would defeat many another driver. Jackson, in spite of his fears of being late, is in the café before her, sees her through the windows, and his heart leaps. She is the solution to all his problems, and his joy is amplified by the slight stiffening feeling in his pants, which suggests to him that this is indeed true love. His encounter with Briony had been bruising. She so despises him, and so lets him know it, that the shortest conversation with her can leave him limp for days and in need of Viagra even though normally he is all eagerness and activity and requires no chemical help. See, Scarlet can vanquish even Briony. Scarlet sits, they lean towards each other, they take each other’s hands, they gaze into each other’s eyes. Those around feel warmly towards them, and envious. Costa’s becomes a magic place.

  You may have realised, reader, as I have just done, that in comparing Arthur’s driving excellence with Scarlet’s, I have suggested a genetic connection between them. In other words Arthur is indeed Beverley’s father, Scarlet’s great-grandfather. I too have been unsure until now. Did it happen as the Christchurch Press would have it, that Walter killed his wife in a crime passionnel, and then shot his dog and himself? Or as Beverley suspected – that she was Arthur’s baby born to Kitchie, and Arthur used the bread knife on Kitchie wh
en she chose to stay with the long-suffering Walter, then took Walter’s gun as Walter fled for his life to the quarry, and shot him and his dog. That months later Arthur stopped by and wooed Rita, in order to get his daughter back. Even to wait until she was grown in order to possess her, to mark his own – it was sheep country, even though he was a doctor – as he had possessed and marked the mother. Though he may have started with the best intentions and weakened on the way: of that even I cannot be sure, and Beverley was doing the provoking. But Arthur as the killer is now the true version. Scarlet has killer’s blood, murderer’s blood, in her veins, for all she appears so lightweight. Jackson had better look out.

  Scarlet called me back down to the basement. She wanted attention and she got it. There’s no cigar smoke down here, and no panting noises and all is quiet; I notice that the green grass the other side of the window-panes has faded to brownish grey, it’s been so hot and dry lately.

  Now, though, here’s Samantha standing in reception at MetaFashion, a Yummy Mummy to dream of, dressed in Boden, sensible and smart. She’s a much better bet for Louis and Nopasaran than Scarlet could ever be. A pity about her husband and three children.

  But Samantha and Louis are just so right. Samantha would be fascinated by what went on at MetaFashion, able to follow the thrills and tensions of the business, never be fighting against Louis where his beloved Nopasaran was concerned; no, she would be with him all the way, outraged by the planning authorities, looking up in Google to prove that English Heritage had misunderstood the law, going to night classes on the Brutalist architecture of the thirties, getting on well with his mother – there were even family connections: her father had been at Bedales with Annabel’s best friend, Samantha’s mother becoming Matron only because of reduced circumstances. If only Samantha’s mother had kept out of the laundry room that afternoon, how happy everyone might have been. Only the GCGITS would not allow it.

  Yes, and most of all Samantha was so obviously fertile and happy to have more children. She’d have had them trained to climb the ladders to bed as soon as they could crawl and she would never utter a complaint. She was a brave, valiant girl and she had loved Louis all her life, her first and only true love. No accident that in later life she often wore shoes with the seam up the middle of the upper: she felt close to Louis when she did.

  When Louis was warned by Beverley that Scarlet was running off to her lover and the couple could be found in Costa’s if he hurried, Louis failed to hurry and who could blame him? Because when he’d called Samantha on the mobile number he kept in his wallet, she’d picked up the phone. There, after years, waiting. She had not lost the phone or changed her number. The GCGITS knows what he’s doing.

  ‘Louis!’ said Samantha. ‘I dreamt of you last night; how strange.’

  ‘It isn’t strange at all,’ said Louis, ‘I dream about you all the time.’

  And it was as if the intervening years had all melted away. Samantha was shopping in Liberty’s: so she was round at MetaFashion in ten minutes in a Boden cord blazer, a well-cut white shirt and a pretty flowered skirt, made of a thirties fabric print with red poppies on a white background – so different from the designer jeans and T-shirt style that Scarlet favoured. Before they knew it they were reunited on a sofa, and the stretch marks on Samantha’s tummy from the three pregnancies and the thinning hair on Louis’ anxious scalp were as nothing.

  Samantha’s husband was one of those business executives who had spent a lot of time flying around the world first or business class, but now in the recession was reduced to making conference calls from his offices in Oxford. The close and continued proximity of his PA had proved too much for him and he had enjoyed a weekend break with her in a famous country-house hotel in the Cotswolds but had felt so guilty he felt obliged to tell Samantha about it, with contrition and apologies, and assurances that the girl, a redhead, was to be transferred to their branch in Edinburgh.

  Samantha, though shocked, had accepted Stanley’s apologies and forgiven, but perhaps not properly, because on meeting Louis an element of tit for tat may have encouraged her embraces. At any rate, when these were concluded, Samantha had sat up on the sofa, covered her ample breasts with her gauze scarf, the one she had just bought at Liberty’s – one of their peacock prints, yellow and grey, with the eye a greeny-blue – wept, and said this must not happen again. She was a married woman and had to think of family and children.

  And just then D’Kath burst in upon them and it was obvious what had been happening on the yellow-velvet sofa. Forget that Samantha, naked beneath the swathe of gauzy scarf, looked like a Lord Leighton painting, crossed with a Klimt, what with the fabric and the build-up of colour combinations and the way the curls of the patterns blended into the tendrils of her hair, D’Kath ignored the exquisite setting and reacted as Samantha’s mother had all those many years ago, with a shriek which could be heard around the building. The couple, shocked, sprang apart hastily.

  And now both of them could think only of poor Stuart, the art master, who on finding Louis unfaithful, had hanged himself in a classroom. It could not be allowed to happen again. They must part. The consequences of illicit love, both knew from experience, can be terrible. The GCGITS gives with one hand, takes away, often brutally, with the other.

  A word about that early disaster. Louis was hardly to be blamed for it. Sheer embarrassment, in the face of the art master’s protracted advances, his insistence that only through sex could genius flourish, had left Louis with little choice but to do what Stuart seemed to expect him to do, that is to declare lasting love. Louis had mouthed words without understanding them. But that had not been how the world had seen it, let alone his mother. It had been very little to do with sex, a great deal to do with love. In the few dreadful weeks before he left the school for good, he became known as Sexbomb the Murderer.

  Lola waits for Louis

  So it was in a state of considerable upset that Louis let himself into Nopasaran. Forget Scarlet – he had found his loved one at last only to lose her, on the way meeting a degree of sexual pleasure he had not known existed. More, he could only conclude from her reaction that his colleague, cousin and partner D’Kath was in love with him, and was a lesbian fellow traveller only. The D’Thises and D’Thats were a business ploy. Now he had offended her, and in her deluded mind betrayed her, which could only bode no good for MetaFashion. Without Scarlet to provide him with an alibi, how was he to fend D’Kath off? Supposing he got to work and found her dangling from the end of a rope? He had construed D’Kath’s occasional embrace and glass of champagne as no more than friendly. So obsessed had he been by the general assumption that he was gay, he had fallen into the trap of supposing the same thing of others.

  He needed time within these beloved and calming walls to compose himself, to work out what he felt and what had to be done about Scarlet’s absence. She was hopeless but already he missed her, her irreverence, her delinquency, her ability to move him to fury. He thought it was good for him; repressing anger gave you cancer, he was convinced. She would probably be back; she had done this twice before, and he had taken her back; today he was not so sure. It was all too much to take on board. And he had forgotten about Lola.

  He was struck first, as he let himself in through the door, by how orderly everything was. Scarlet’s mess had been tidied away: there were no odd shoes on the floor any old where: no discarded magazines tossed lightly away, no uncased mascara wands to be trodden into the original carpeting and so on, no old coffee cups spilled and forgotten. Cushions were plumped. He realised the artless carelessness which once had seemed so charming in Scarlet had become a source of irritation. But at least today she had cleared up before she went. It was a nice gesture. He hoped that if Scarlet had indeed gone for good, he would be able to go on turning up at Robinsdale. He liked Beverley and she liked him; mind you, he was frightened of Cynara, sorry for Jesper, alarmed by the thought of D’Dora, fascinated by Lola, and even as she came to mind, here she was. Of course
, she was the house guest.

  Lola was wearing the transparent top with lacy frills which Scarlet occasionally wore to parties with a slip beneath it, just high enough to hide the nipples. Lola wore the same garment without the slip, together with a thong, and that was all. Her long legs and feet were bare. She was reaching up with the metal hose to suck up cobwebs and dust from high places. Partly Louis was delighted that someone was bothering to do it, no matter how they were dressed, and partly he found the sight stirring, fresh as he was from the feel of Samantha beneath her Liberty gauze scarf with its Pre-Raphaelite undertones. This seemed to be a Tracey Emin version of the same thing, but valid enough. And it had a cultural context. Had he not once seen a Godard film of the young Brigitte Bardot doing the housework naked?

  ‘Your wife is a real pig,’ said Lola. ‘She left me to do all this and has gone off with Jackson Wright the vampire.’

  ‘I heard as much,’ said Louis, wincing. ‘She is not technically my wife, only morally, and please don’t talk of your aunt like that. Shouldn’t you cover yourself up a bit?’

  ‘Why? Do you fancy me?’ asked Lola, disentangling herself from the period vacuum cleaner, neatly coiling its wires by hand – it was too old even to have spring-loading for the cord – and following him into the kitchen. The dishes which were normally piled into the sink had been washed and put away. Plates were in size order, saucepans ranged with their handles all pointing in the same direction.

  ‘Looks nice, doesn’t it?’ said Lola.

  Scarlet had no visual sense, but Lola had. She must have got that from her father Jesper – though of course we must remember her mother Cynara’s father was Unknown – it said so on her birth certificate, and Alice had refused to speak more on the subject to anyone. In vain did Beverley beg, and later Cynara plead, and health visitors protest – what about genetic risks and so forth, and a child had a right to know the identity of both parents, on and on – but Alice wouldn’t tell.